You wake up at one of the many desks in the library.
There are tons of these scattered every which way. You can sit at them and take naps, though when you do you reappear at another desk completely randomly.
Exactly one of these desks will allow you to "wake up" back in the actual library you originally fell asleep in, which is part of the plot.
Pinpointing requires gathering enough of the clues -- each clue has some amount of data in the way crazy diamond's hint system works so you have to find a bunch of them and kinda aggregate them and then eventually just guess if you don't find the other clues you need.
There are vending machines where you can purchase various snacks and drinks. They cost realistic money, which can be found in the coin return slots or on desks, etc. Eating/drinking regularly will keep you from becoming weak-- a state where you *have to* sleep or else all actions take time. Sleeping respawns you elsewhere in the library. Coffee machines are free drinks that you'll also find elsewhere.
Somewhere there will be occasionally be a payphone -- you can input any 10 digit number here and a robot will answer in a random language. You can respond with whatever but if it doesn't match the language or you just repeat their words back they'll hang up. Success however will make the phone booth disappear, that particular phone number accessible, and give you a Clue.
Desks inside offices will allow you to arrange objects on them, which will unlock various tumblers in a lock-puzzler. The desk here will give you a sticky note with a Clue.
You can pick up paperclips in offices. The game makes fun of you for doing this with increasingly aggressive and/or trick messages, but paperclips are useful in the endgame. One of them will be "Pake a Taperclip", which adds... a Taperclip to your inventory, the description swapping p's and t's accordingly. No real point beyond that.
An old plant with vines growing on it and a Greek bust without a face will be a couple objects that can follow you around -- eventually they'll be paired and you'll be able to enter the Art section of the library -- I'm guessing this only happens after the false ending.
The false ending is you find the right desk and wake up back in the real world... except the ending has a "turn the page" prompt which goes back to the random book format. This ending and book are a literal spot somewhere in the library, and reading that page is another way to reach the endgame.
The false ending will open up new areas of the library that tie in more to the lore/Story -- the Bust will have vines growing on it now and if you get too close you'll be teleported elsewhere, however doors that previously went to brick walls will instead go to Art sections -- museums, statue areas, etc.
These sections contain books in english-like languages, more Lore (still largely conflicting) and will eventually lead to the Heart.
The Heart is a boss fight at the (actual) end of the game. It's a literal heart made out of book pages, with various worlds trapped in bubbles around it, including actual reality. It's implied to be the Source of all artistic inspiration and where books go when they're destroyed, etc. You have to defeat it to return to reality.
The combat is like old GTT mazes where you pick options -- there is however a time limit.
Instead of health you have a book with some number of pages -- taking damage will rip pages out. Your main weapon is a Quill that turns into a kind of sword.
It has at least two attacks:
Classics -- it'll throw various classics books at you, and one of the options are the theme of the book and right, like with Moby Dick you have to spear it with your quill. Each seed has a random selection of these so you can learn the patterns if nothing else.
Dictionary -- mostly chosen so it can literally throw the dictionary at you. The options will be standard, however they'll be definitions rather than words, like the "dodge" option will be a definition for the dodge word, or some synonym. The selections here run the full gamut on every seed.
If you lose all pages of your book, you'll wake back up at a random desk.
Paperclips can be thrown at attacks to clip together some pages and make the attacks deal less damage. This happens automatically. They also make it easier to attack, however that works.
The Heart should be named some synonym of heart. Possibly chosen randomly per seed.
Foyers, which connect to various corridors and also connect buildings together.
Corridors, which connect to Locations, Foyers and also other subcorridors. These will also have staircases, elevators and doors.
Staircases -- go up or down a single level and connect to one of the corridors up there -- rarely makes sense. Can't access the basements, they're literally gated off.
Elevators -- lets you pick the floor you want to go to, but can't go to the 13th floor or to the sub-basements without the right Passcode.
Corridor doors -- will go into rooms but will sometimes go into brick walls -- this changes at the end of the game.
Locations
Locations have entrances from Corridors and also link to each other in a nonsensical way. These spaces are kinda huge (in terms of the number of exits) and very mazelike. There are various Location types:
Rooms -- contains shelves of books, some desks and lots of doors.
Study halls -- contains rows and columns of desks. Less doors.
Offices -- have exactly one door out. Contain unlockable desks that have clues when the puzzle is solved.
Reference Rooms -- Contains dictionaries of random languages -- this helps in learning how to use the phones. The words are in alphabetical order assuming that's possible and the definitions are in that language and have the word itself filtered out. Idk how phone numbers/ dictionaries / languages are linked however, there should be a way of knowing *which* language you're dealing with and find the right dictionary for it. Scrap this, not useful to the game mechanics, which are waaaay more solid now
Storage -- useful for Lore/horror purposes. Tend to contain Keys for offices.
Lounges -- Food, drink and money.
Electrical Rooms -- useful for Lore/horror purposes. Electrical Rooms will turn elevators on, which is necessary to reach the sub-basements and also helps with overall navigation.
Spiral Staircases -- Link Rooms throughout the building in a Nonlinear way. The Z building does something similar but exclusively links Foyers of buildings. Spiral staircases have a fixed number of rooms they'll link to but the actual pattern is random, though you don't get doubler-type repeats.
A kind of game progression is starting to crystallize, which looks like this:
Find storage rooms, which contain keys.
Use those keys to unlock offices.
These will give you access to the electrical Rooms.
These will turn the elevators on.
Use Staircases to reach the 13th floor, which will give you the Passcode to reach the sub-basement.
The sub-basement will give you the Last set of clues needed to get the false ending.
With the false ending, you can go through bricked doors to art sections/payphones.
These will lead you to The Heart.
Along the way you'll find Clues, which tell you the location of pieces of lore or pieces of the overall desk puzzle. These can be layered, like clues that lead to more clues. The algorithm here is more of a Scan -- each Room has a fixed number of clues that are on or in books, below desks, etc. The previous clues will scan stuff nearby to find the next tier up of clue, with the bottom tier being a book location for Lore or desk puzzle clues. So a kind of WGC layout.
Clues are found purely through exploring, though they're easier to find in smaller rooms. Offices will also always give you a Clue, along with 0-2 paperclips.
There are 36 keys in the maze, labeled 0-9,A-Z. Storage rooms will always contain a key somewhere and their doors might be locked but never by the key they hold. Offices are always locked.
Keys can rarely be found in Stairwells or Lounges. Same deal with money. Money can also be found in storage rooms and offices, in coin denominations which are stored separately. You can put whatever combination you like into vending machines to up the immersion a bit.
Once you have a particular key, you won't be able to pick up additional versions of it.
You can also find Skeleton Keys -- these will let you open any door but they break after a single use.
You'll occasionally find Filing Cabinets -- these are locked by one of the keys but have a higher proportion of Clues.
There are sections of the library that have room links like how fleet works and several exit points. These exit points go into fixed corridors. Rooms need at least 2 links but can have more depending on the type of room, while those with single exits are offshoots of the mother rooms. Section size and composition varies a lot.
Each building has a "shape" which is a number representing the number of "sides" and a number representing Corridor length and a number inside tha representing how they connect in star-like ways. Like there might be a triangle which is a 3-N-0 shape, or there might be a 3-5-3 shape that says that the three corridors connect at the 3rd spot of a 5-door hallway.
Shapes are distributed rather than random, so you get equal amounts of triangles as Pentagon's, long sides as short sides, etc.
Each floor seeds how many of the side slots are actually filled and how corridors branch
Corridors can have additional smaller corridors that branch off fractally, following the side slot algorithm but definitely terminating somewhere. So the overall Corridor structure is finite and known beforehand, which allows Section mapping.
Each Section is some node in that fractal, so its exits correspond to nearby nodes. Thus it makes more sense to seed the lowest tier of Corridor to find how many sections there are, then create sections based on the known exits.
There should however be more complex arrangements that can also be done with the fractal logic so sections can also connect to corridors elsewhere in the fractal on the same floor. This should however be something separate from section entrances so that can still be linked right-- those overhead bridge things maybe? You could enter the bridge from a section but the actual section id would be based on its main entrances.
They all go to random things in a non-repeating random pattern. The algorithm should pick two unique nodes each iteration and then modulo through them to allow for this. Spiral staircases are infinite and one-way connections -- where you enter from determines how that particular staircase goes and your exit point is at the origin. So circling back isn't linear.
Like entering from A might go A,F,J,A,C. If you enter that second A and then exit, you're back at the first A there. If you enter C and then exit, you instead get the C pattern which might go. C,K,X,S. There should be some kind of antechamber or something so it feels like you just navigated it wrong or the one-way thing otherwise makes sense.
The node distribution looks like this:
Z building -- connects to letter building Foyers and also that horrible void thing and maybe other interesting stuff.
Building Spirals -- Connects to Corridor nodes and Rooms (so, also connects to sections). Will never connect to the 13th floor. Very random distribution here, ignores floor rules -- you could totally be on the 3rd floor and have the 4th floor right below you. There is at least one Spiral staircase in a Corridor and one in a Room, but could be many more. The full location address is what dictates the non-repeating and infinite pattern and connections are one-way so this doesn't have to be known beforehand.
Basement Spiral Staircases
Rooms can occasionally contain elevators that go to other rooms on the appropriate floor, but these don't have sub-basement access, only Corridor ones do.
All Corridor elevators are known about beforehand and they're finite, though the Corridor structure is too, to be fair.
All sub-basement elevators in a building will connect via this type of Spiral staircases, which also has an entrance into the Master Stair.
The Master Stair connects to all sub-basement Spiral staircases in *all* buildings and can also connect to other locations randomly from its many smaller doors via one-way connections. It also ultimately connects to The Heart.
Better navigation
All staircases have filing cabinets at their entrance locked with some key. The contents here will tell you what the Spiral staircases patterns look like -- useful for finding the Master Stair and the Heart but maybe also with the other staircase types.
The Spiral staircases obviously, though they're more a fixed non-repeating pattern of finite connections.
Warehouse rooms contain an infinite amount of books in some specific language family in fractal boxes/pallets/etc out to the other direction of scale, which might also be infinite. They also have one-way doors that exit via the bricked doors.
The Void is infinite, though exploring it isn't wise. As you move away from the building it'll shrink more and more. You'd need to bring snacks and drinks to explore this space, and there might be stuff out here to find.
Exploring both Warehouses and The Void make some amount of sense for overall game progression, though idk how exactly-- the warehouses are going to have forklifts and so probably also spotlights and tools which would let you explore the void better and access ventilation shafts.
Ventilation Shafts -- Stairwells contain entrances to these that can be accessed with a screwdriver. They're horrible 2d mazes that go to random rooms on the current floor in Nonlinear ways with other turns in between. Exiting is one-way as you crash to the room below. They're non-repeating but truly infinite, and only the origin 0,0 goes back go the Stairwell. They're the only way to access Overseer Offices, which give you the passcode to Warehouses. A filing cabinet nearby will "scan" for overseer offices.
Warehouses are infinite as mentioned with random one-way exits, but contain flashlights (in scannable Tool Box locations, knowable via the 13th floor, which also knows about Warehouse entrances via Blueprint rooms) and clues about the void. Flashlights allow you to explore The Void.
Tool rooms that contain the screwdriver and Pliers are found on building spiral staircases, however there's only one tool room per staircase.
The void contains the Passcode for the sub-basements. Not sure what the mechanic is here, but you need the flashlight and need batteries, which can be found in the Closets of the 13th floor along with the screwdriver and Pliers -- Pliers will let you bend a key into another key type but you can only do this once per key. Unmorphed keys can be stored separate to morphed ones, so you have a use for extra keys. Each plier can only turn a key into a fixed set of other keys.
The 13th floor and *particularly* the void is where the horror elements get kicked up a notch. Maybe you need the flashlight to dispel monsters in the void or something. It's definitely its own set of mechanics.
Storage rooms give you keys, which have a variety of uses.
Keys unlock Offices, which give you access to Electrical Rooms.
Electrical Rooms allow you to activate the Elevators.
Spiral Staircases give you access to Tool Rooms so there should be at least one per every 2-3 sections. This gives you Pliers (optional but useful) and Screwdrivers.
Screwdrivers let you access ventilation shafts.
Ventilation Shafts let you access the Overseer's office, which there's exactly one per floor with a fixed exit point and no entry usually. The overseer's office gives you the passcode to Warehouses.
You'll need to explore the 13th floors Blueprint rooms to figure out where Warehouses are and where the Toolboxes are -- these contain flashlights. Blueprint rooms are also the only place to get batteries, which flashlights require.
With flashlights, you can explore the Void and get the passcode to the sub-basements.
Sub-basements go into their own spirals and eventually lead to The Heart, which is how you beat the game. You do also have to find the false ending desk first. This will unlock some part of the above progression and it requires following clues, some parts of which are gate-locked behind other parts of the progression. I'm not sure yet which are post-sleep and which are pre-sleep, but I want to have some game progression in place for finding some sets of clues at least.
There's one Electrical room per floor accessible via the Foyer, along with the Overseer room (makes the most sense). It has panels for every single room as well as the elevator shafts.
Some sections are dark by default, which means you can't read books in there and there's additional horror elements. Some may instead have flickering lights which occasionally blacken your screen. Both of these issues can be fixed by the Electrical room.
You have to know *which* panel the elevator control belongs to, which the office tells you. Doing it randomly isn't really an option because that'll just make areas dark. I guess it's *technically* possible to bypass offices, but you're missing out on vital wakeup clues, unless you're also bypassing that. So I guess you have access to the electrical room from the outset. It has toggle switches but they're at random angles so you don't know where ON and OFF are. This may be indicated visually.
Since you get some kind of coordinate mapping at all times, you should be able to easily turn section lights on and off -- you'll probably return to the electrical room frequently to do exactly this. To add to the mechanics a bit there's probably load limits so the entire floor can't be illuminated all at once, each section of panels has its own set of limits, and each panel has a different Watt usage to improve the puzzle mechanics.
Some clues may be glow-in-the-dark, in which case you'd need flashlight/batteries and the room OFF. This helps make the game progression a bit more Nonlinear. Dark rooms should definitely add to the horror aesthetic. It kinda makes sense to bundle this into the Void game progression, so instead of getting the sub-basement passcode you figure out which room has a glow-in-the-dark clue with the sub-basement keycode in there. Both flashlights and GITD should be indicated visually (along with darkness obviously) to add to the immersion.
The sub-basements are lit by candles and old technology and cobwebs and whatnot and are where the creepy factor really ramps up (especially the phones), so it makes sense that the GITD is something more supernatural. To find the room you have to capture one of the shadows in the void by setting a containment vessel down and when one appears, shining a flashlight on it to move it into the containment vessel. Then you can take it back in -- the vessel will have different colors depending on how close you are to the GITD room and book and you basically have to wander around to find it. Containment vessels can be any Crystal -- offices will occasionally contain these. Blueprint rooms will at least give you instructions.
The sub-basement is kinda-sorta demonic so the keypad in elevators needs to have weird alien symbols where the GITD passcode determines. Also that whole shadow capturing thing.
The sub-basements are much older sections of the library. They're lit by candles and older tech -- the deeper you go the older it gets, with Egyptian and hittite type stuff happening. They also all connect together via Spiral staircases, eventually leading to The Heart.
These Spiral staircases don't have filing cabinets, they'll instead have stones or totems or something that nonetheless have keyhole for your many keys.
There are art galleries and museums with artifacts from whatever time period you're in, all of which also contain monsters and disasters and other horror stuff -- the whole sub-basement should give off a bad vibe. Greek busts with vines and other elements from the rest of the game come to light as well.
There also isn't food down here, you have to bring it. There is however a lot of gold and silver coins which can be used in vending machines. There are also a lot of skeleton keys.
The mechanic down here is opening the door to the Heart (and I guess finding it). To do that you need to find phone booths and use that mechanic to get clues in the English-like scrolls which are in the Master Stair. Phone booths are only found in art galleries, as some kind of weird techno art piece with fax machines and stuff. They're coin- operated and conveniently can use gold/ silver coins, which are found in the Museum rooms.
Instead of numbers you get the weird symbols again but the concept is the same. Figure out how the language works and give new words at the prompts. Success will cause the fax machine to print out part of an English scroll location. You'll need to do this a few times.
English Scrolls are identical to books but use English morphotactics and phonemes so they'll probably generate actual words a lot. Somewhere in there are the clues to the Heart Door.
The Heart door contains the entirety of web-safe unicode in a square grid. You enter the passcode here and the door unlocks.
Horror elements happen sequentially when doing certain things or can happen fairly randomly. They'll trigger additional substates to the event depending on what exactly you do to react.
the humming noise wvent will get louder or softer when you switch rooms, finally culminating in it just getting louder without bound.
Messages will start to have small typos, which eventually builds up into explicit letter replacement before disappearing again for no reason.
vending machines after you've successfully used a few will occasionally have more letters or numbers than there are available slots. This will look like a programming error and be subtle up until the point where you get like 90 letters.
you'll get prompts to do various inane things like eat books or jump down Spiral staircases.
you'll hear things or see things, and this eventually culminates in wild visions that disappear as you wake up at a nearby desk.
One time you'll have some message somewhere (nothing game-breaking), and it'll instead appear as part of a book at a shelf nearby that's otherwise blank, and when you put it away it never existed.
Sometimes a room connection will bring you back to the same room.
If you read a book for long enough it'll start repeating weird phrases in other common actual languages like French or German-- though this disappears if you go back to it.
Things in a room will change position. This happens a lot and it's subtle.
Similarly, paintings will display different content.
The various Horror elements are an extra layer on the game -- they replace what the procgen engine does with occasional random madness.
